Megapixels?

Question

With digital cameras what do the megapixels mean? I know that the more megapixels it has, the better it is, but what makes it better?

Answer 1

If you're looking at a new digital camera this is an important term to understand. The term megapixel (MP) refers to the frame size of a digital picture. It is how many million pixels, or dots of resolution, a digital camera is capable of capturing. The total pixel count is determined by multiplying the number of horizontal pixels by the vertical ones (for example, 5MP = 2560 x 1920). A camera with a higher MP rating will capture images with a larger frame size, which contains more picture information.

How many megapixels is enough?
Most current digital cameras offer a minimum of 5MP, with high-end consumer models reaching 10MP. If you plan on printing standard 4"x6" photos taken on a digital camera, 5MP is sufficient. However, if you want to crop your photos or create large, high-quality prints, the more megapixels, the better. Cameras that offer a high MP count will also allow you to take photos at a lower MP setting if you want to save space on your memory card, but you should only do this when absolutely necessary.

To zoom or not to zoom.
While digital zoom seems useful, using photo-editing software to zoom in on an existing picture actually provides better results. When you use digital zoom, your camera does not capture any additional information. It makes the image look bigger by interpolating, or resampling, and then adding in extra pixels by "guessing". This can be done using photo editing software on your computer with more control and better results. You can also experiment more with the framing and sizing on your computer. If you rely on digital zoom, you limit your options when you click the shutter. For composing shots it's generally best to rely on your camera's optical zoom, which actually captures a more detailed, close-up photo.

Note that using any sort of zoom will also intensify camera shakes, possibly resulting in blurry photos, so look for a model with image stabilization.

More pixels means more options.
The general rule of digital imaging is: the more pixels you have, the more you can afford to throw out. This means that having a camera with a higher MP rating is best because you can capture more pixels at first, so you have more options later on. If you try to do the opposite and add extra pixels to an existing photo, the results won't be nearly as good.

Answer 2

OK, here's pixels in a nutshell.

Spell the letter "T" using 6 pennies.

Now spell the letter "T" using 18 pennies.

Which one looks better and more like a T?

That's it - almost.
If your glasses are dirty, a T spelled with 100 pennies would still be blurry, even though you figure that a 100 penny T has got to look great - right?
Wrong.

There a mega-pixel race amongst camera manufactures out there.
In the rush to get more pixels, sometimes less expensive lens designs (cheap) are used.

Otherwise, all things being equal, more megapixels would let you produce lbetter quality print in the larger sizes.
Check anywhere on the web and you will find that there are suggestions, rules of thumb, and tables (as many as you want) - which will tell you as many answers as you'd like - as to how many megapixels you need for a print of X size.

A question first.
What's the biggest photographic print you've _ever_
in your life had anything enlarged to? I thought so...

More megapixels would let you edit the photo and zoom in with better quality on a face in a group shot.
Of course, it's a lot easier to do it in the camera.
With the "cost" of digital film (memory that you can reuse and reuse and reuse). - you could just take a closeup of everyone. ;).

Don't buy anything you haven't researched at least a bit. Check it out on bizrate or cnet and some other shopping sites and see what the people who bought the camera are saying.

Some cameras with 7 megapixels make worse pictures than a painting from a paint by number set by someone who's only learned to count to 5 so far...

If you have some specific uses in mind or properties in mind - I could provide more help.

Examples:
You'd like to capture details of itsy-bitsy jewelry items to that you design and make to sell on eBay.
Take lots of pictures of "x" & "y" sports outdoors and just occcasional pics of "z" sports indoors, travel photos (it's usually just better to just buy the postcard...) - and it has to be no bigger than the size of a deck of cards).

What pictures have you taken in the past?
Do you expect that to change much? How so?
Are there any special pictures you always wanted to take, but couldn't with that old camera?

Answer 3

"mega" means millions...so a 3 megapixel camera has 3 million pixels. Each pixel is a dot that is sensitive to light, and all the pixels together make up the image. You should be familiar with the idea of pixels from your computer monitor -- you probably are running at a "resolution" of something like 1280x1024, which means you have 1280 pixels across your screen, and 1024 rows of them (and 1280 times 1024 is about 1.3 megapixels).

"how many" is important depending on how big you want to make prints from your camera's images. You usually need to print the images at 200 to 300 pixels per inch -- otherwise you start to see the little dots that make up the image, and it no longer looks like a smooth, continous image. With a 6 megapixel camera (3000 x 2000 pixels), printing at 300 PPI (pixels per inch) gives you a 10" by 6.7" print. Printing at 200 PPI gives you a 15" x 10" print. You can make smaller prints with no problem, but going any bigger than 15"x10" with a 6MP camera won't give very good results. The more megapixels you have, the bigger the prints you can make that look good.

Beware, though -- some compact digital cameras with LOTS of megapixels sometimes have problems with noise and sensitivity, so there's a price to pay for lots of pixels. Try and see image samples before you buy a high-megapixel camera.

Answer 4

the amount of pixels in a picture, pictures with a resolution of 1024x768 would be 786,432 or .79MP witch is a common computer screen resolution, 1600x1200 would be 2MP and 4,000x3,000 would be 12MP

so the higher the mega pixels higher the resolution and the more information about the picture is saved to give a clearer image.

Answer 5

a pixel is one dot of light. It is how many dots of light are in a picture. One mega of pixels means there are one million dots of light in the picture..

Answer 6

means you can enlarge the pics heaps without loosing clarity